Offers no path for fix
Mr. Walter Williams' Thursday column addressed the gun crime in America. Both he and I believe there is a solution. Mr. Williams believes the cause of gun deaths is a moral collapse in American values. I believe in an adjustment in the Second Amendment.
The problem in Mr. Williams' idea is a lack of the U.S. government's ability to legislate morality. He offers no path to achieve this. While it is difficult to change gun laws against powerful lobbies, the government has the ability to do so. Mostly again it's a continued fault of conservatives--tremendous ability to point out problems, and a lack of logical means to solve them.
BILL FRITZ
Hot Springs Village
You cannot be both
There is an enormous schism occurring in American Christianity as significant as the Protestant Reformation.
The quest for political power and money has driven those churches called evangelicals to a place where they are no longer recognizable as Christian. They honor the same scriptures with their lips, but their hearts are far from their origins.
Evangelicalism is emerging as a new religion as distinguishable from Christianity as Judaism and Islam.
As a daughter said to her mother, "Mom, I've decided to become an evangelical Christian," to which the mother replied, "You'll have to decide, Dear. You can't be both."
GENE REID
Little Rock
For renewable energy
Arkansas has determined the climate crisis is real. A study by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission concludes that Arkansas will experience significant negative effects from climate change:
• Increase in average yearly temps, especially in Northwest Arkansas
• More frequent heat waves
• Public health problems including insect-borne diseases and heat related illnesses
• Intense rainfall causing soil erosion
• Eastern farmland drought and flooding.
Unfortunately, we are already experiencing these effects; worse yet, our children will have to bear the heaviest burden. As a father and grandfather, I find this is unacceptable.
Fayetteville has passed an "Energy Action Plan" to become the first Arkansas city to officially join the "Ready for 100 Club" (a commitment to 100 percent renewable energy). I applaud Fayetteville for taking action and urge my hometown of Rogers to commit to renewable energy.
ROBERT and SUE PEKEL
Rogers
Sculpture not worthy
For years the city leadership has continued its obsession with downtown Little Rock. Now it has traded a piece of land sitting under a parking deck for a hunk of metal some see as "art."
This reminds me of how some colonists traded a bunch of trinkets and trash to the Indians for a nice piece of land in New York.
Few residents of Little Rock can see the value of this piece of metal. It obstructed the intersection of Capitol and Main for years. Even the pigeons didn't appreciate it then, and probably still don't.
I know, in seven years we'd get this hunk of metal and the parking deck. So why am I concerned about this?
It's just another example of how our city leaders go out of their way to prop up downtown Little Rock and those who do business there. We will never have an effective city government as long as the focus is concentrated on a few square blocks of downtown real estate.
Alice Walton can afford $5 million art, but Little Rock should be able to find better uses for our money.
DON SHELLABARGER
Little Rock
Please curb your dog
I have a complaint against dog owners that take their dogs for a walk but do not take a bag, then let their dog stop by people's mailboxes and take a poop. Some even let their dog right out in the middle of some people's yards and squat.
How rude!
We live in a neighborhood where people have fenced-in backyards. These rude, obnoxious people do not want to clean up their dog's poop but want someone else to clean it up. But what is worse is stepping on it when you go to get the mail and having to clean it off your shoes.
If you call code enforcement, you have to have a physical address for them to come. They apparently can't even put a letter on doors of the neighborhood as a warning to remind people that are subject to be fined if they are caught doing this. But you have to catch them twice and turn them in twice for them to be fined. Most of the time, all you find is a pile of poop.
I am telling you, if more authority was given to the enforcement agency, these people that love their dogs so much would act like these animals are their responsibility, and not someone else's.
BILLIE JOHNSTON
North Little Rock
Editorial on 03/24/2018